Alice Childress | |
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| Born | Alice Herndon (1916-10-12)October 12, 1916 |
| Died | August 14, 1994(1994-08-14) (aged 77) New York City, U.S. |
| Other names | Louise Henderson |
| Occupations |
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| Notable work | Like One of the Family (1956);A Hero Ain't Nothin' but a Sandwich (1973) |
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Alice Childress (October 12, 1916[1] – August 14, 1994) was an American novelist,playwright, andactress, acknowledged as "the onlyAfrican-American woman to have written, produced, and published plays for four decades."[2] Childress described her work as trying to portray the have-nots in a have society,[3] saying: "My writing attempts to interpret the 'ordinary' because they are not ordinary. Each human is uniquely different. Like snowflakes, the human pattern is never cast twice. We are uncommonly and marvellously intricate in thought and action, our problems are most complex and, too often, silently borne."[4] Childress became involved in social causes, and formed anoff-Broadway union for actors.[5]
Alice Childress's paper archive is held at theSchomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem, New York.[6]
Childress (née Herndon) was born inCharleston, South Carolina, but at the age of nine, after her parents separated, she moved toHarlem, New York City, where she lived with her grandmother, Eliza Campbell White, on 118th Street, betweenLenox Avenue andFifth Avenue.[7][8] Though her grandmother, the daughter of a slave,[9] had no formal education, she encouraged Alice to pursue her talents in reading and writing.[10] Alice attended public school in New York for her middle-school education and went on toWadleigh High School, but had to drop out once her grandmother died.[7] She became involved in theater immediately after her high school and she did not attend college.[11]
Childress took odd jobs to pay for herself, including domestic worker, photo retoucher, assistant machinist, saleslady, and insurance agent. In 1939, she studied Drama in theAmerican Negro Theatre (ANT), and performed for the company for 11 years. She acted inAbram Hill and John Silvera'sOn Strivers Row (1940), Theodore Brown'sNatural Man (1941), andPhilip Yordan'sAnna Lucasta (1944).[11] There she won acclaim as an actress in numerous other productions, and moved toBroadway with the transfer of ANT's hitAnna Lucasta, which became the longest-running all-black play in Broadway history[12] among a cast that also includedHilda Simms,Canada Lee, Georgia Burke,Earle Hyman andFrederick O'Neal.[13] Though many biographies list her as having received aTony Award nomination for her starring performance, this information appears to be inaccurate as the Tony Awards did not begin until 1947, some years after the production.[2][4]
In 1949, she began her writing career with the one-act playFlorence, which she directed and starred in, and which reflected many of the themes that are characteristic of her later writing, including the empowerment of black women, interracial politics, and working-class life.[3][14] InFlorence, a black, Southern, working-class woman, Mama Whitney, decides to travel by train from South Carolina to New York City to retrieve her daughter, Florence, who is a struggling actor. However, after a white woman waiting for the same train offers to help Florence by recommending her for a job as a maid, Mama Whitney decides to send her daughter money instead bringing her home.[8][15] Childress' goal in writingFlorence was to "settle an argument with fellow actors (Sidney Poitier among others) who said that in a play about Negroes and whites, only a 'life and death thing' like lynching is interesting on stage."[16]
Her 1950 play,Just a Little Simple, was adapted from theLangston Hughes novelSimple Speaks His Mind and was produced in Harlem at the Club Baron Theatre. Her next play,Gold Through the Trees (1952), gave her the distinction of being one of the first African-American women to have worked professionally produced on the New York stage.[17] The success of these plays enabled her to bring Harlem's first all-union off-Broadway contracts into practice.[18]
Childress's first full-length, dramatic play,Trouble in Mind was produced atStella Holt's Greenwich Mews Theatre in 1955 and ran for 91 performances.[8] Biographies and her 1994 obituary claim thatTrouble in Mind won anObie award for the best off-Broadway play of the 1955–56 season,[2] which would have made Childress the first African American woman to be awarded the honor.[14] However,Trouble in Mind is not in the American Theatre Wing's records as having won an Obie for the 1955–56 season.[19]Trouble in Mind is about racism in the theater world. In a play-within-a-play, Childress depicts the frustrations of black actors and actresses in mainstream white theater.[8][20] The show's success led to plans for a Broadway transfer, but these plans were nixed when Childress refused to change the play's ending. Had it opened, it would have been the first play by an African American woman to open on Broadway (a title taken byA Raisin in the Sun four years later).[21] An acclaimed revival ofTrouble in Mind was presented on Broadway from October 29, 2021, to January 9, 2022, atRoundabout Theatre Company'sAmerican Airlines Theatre. It starredLaChanze,Chuck Cooper,Michael Zegen,Danielle Campbell,Jessica Frances Dukes,Brandon Micheal Hall,Don Stephenson, Alex Mickiewicz, andSimon Jones and was directed byCharles Randolph-Wright.[22] The production was nominated for fourTony Awards includingBest Revival of a Play,Best Actress in a Play (LaChanze),Best Featured Actor in a Play (Chuck Cooper), andBest Costume Design in a Play (Emilio Sosa).[23]
She completed her next dramatic work,Wedding Band: A Love/Hate Story in Black and White, in 1962. Its setting isSouth Carolina duringWorld War I and deals with a forbidden interracial love affair. Due to the scandalous nature of the show and the stark realism it presented, it was impossible for Childress to persuade any theatre in New York to stage it. The show premiered in 1966 at theUniversity of Michigan inAnn Arbor, and was also produced inChicago. It was not until 1972 that it played in New York at theNew York Shakespeare Festival, starringRuby Dee.[2] It was later filmed and shown on TV, but many stations refused to screen it.[24] A production was staged atTheatre for a New Audience from April 23 to May 15, 2022, directed by Awoye Timpo and featuringThomas Sadoski andVeanne Cox.[25] In the summer of 2023, it was produced at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival, starring Antonette Rudder and Cyrus Lane, directed by Sam White.[26]
In 1965, Childress was featured in theBBC presentationThe Negro in the American Theatre. From 1966 to 1968, she was a scholar-in-residence at theRadcliffe Institute for Advanced Study,Harvard University.[27][28]
In conjunction with her composer husband, Nathan Woodard, she wrote musical plays, includingYoung Martin Luther King (originally entitledThe Freedom Drum) in 1968 andSea Island Song (1977).[3]
Childress published more than thirty columns in thePaul Robeson-associated newspaper,Freedom. The tabloid monthly ran from 1950 through 1955, and in 1956 she published a collection of them in her novelLike One of the Family. The ones in the book are not always identical with the originals in the newspaper, as the latter often explored a theme discussed elsewhere in the issue.[29] As an example of Childress' approach here, when the unconsciously racist employer asks for a health card from the book's protagonist Mildred, a Black domestic worker, Mildred pretends to be relieved, saying she'd wondered how to ask for their own health cards from the family whose laundry she handles and whose beds she makes. The embarrassed employer backs off.[30]
Also in association withFreedom, in 1952 Childress collaborated withLorraine Hansberry, who had recently relocated to New York City and begun working at the paper. They co-wrote a pageant forFreedom's Negro History Festival, withHarry Belafonte,Sidney Poitier,Douglas Turner Ward andJohn O. Killens providing narration. Childress, sixteen years older than Hansberry, introduced the latter to the Black theatrical community of New York.[31] This was Hansberry's earliest surviving theatrical work.[32]
Alice Childress is also known for her young adult novels, among which areThose Other People (1989) andA Hero Ain't Nothin' but a Sandwich (1973). She adapted the latter as a screenplay for the 1977 feature film also entitledA Hero Ain't Nothin' but a Sandwich, starringCicely Tyson andPaul Winfield.[12]
She had used the names Louise Henderson and Alice Herndon[33] before her marriage in 1934 to actorAlvin Childress. The couple had a daughter together, Jean R. Childress, and divorced in 1957,[34] when musician Nathan Woodard became her second husband.[3][14]
She died ofcancer, aged 77, at Astoria General Hospital inQueens, New York.[18][33] At the time of her death she was working on a story about her African great-grandmother, Ani-Campbell, who had been a slave,[35][8] and herScots-Irish great-grandmother.[36]
The song "Alice Childress" by theBen Folds Five is not related to her. It is a coincidence that there was a woman with the same name that poured water onBen Folds' wife at the time,Anna Goodman.[38]
Childress was a member ofSigma Gamma Rho sorority.[39]
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